That pretty much settle the discussion. I hire interns then pay them freelancing after that. Never would I dare hiring them.
That's true (although it's a pretty junior salary). However, thanks to the stuff funded by the €35k he didn't receive directly:
* he has no student loan;
* his kids' school is free or very cheap;
* he has top-level health insurance, and he knows there's a 0% chance he'll ever lose it; he hasn't got a clue what "preexisting condition" might even mean;
* he lives in a place safe enough that there's no sense in paying to live in a gated community; he probably doesn't know what a "gated community" is actually;
* he's got decent unemployment insurance (even if his qualifications are his best employment insurance, it still allows him to get bank loans more easily);
* his retirement is funded;
* his wife will be able to take years off to raise his babies under financially interesting conditions (legally he can, too, but culturally he usually won't want to).
* he gets massive tax breaks if he employs a nanny, a maid, etc.
So all-in-all, I'm not sure you're better off with $100K in the US than with €35K in France.
You're not sure because you _can't_ be sure. Because there's no competitive offer to help price discovery.
It isn't. The grand-parent post implied that paying €2 for every euro in the employee's pocket what a terrible disadvantage for French companies. My point was to show that, all things considered, it was not a huge disadvantage, and that it might even not have been a disadvantage at all, if we knew how to communicate about it.
May I add that employees are, on average, more risk-averse than entrepreneurs. So the lower-risk, lower-reward compromise enforced by France will be more seductive to many of them than the quasi-libertarian approach adopted in the USA.
The US model on the other hand has a few good side effects, but is so meaninglessly violent, stupid and wasteful that even then more is destroyed than is created.
> his kids' school is free or very cheap;
You don't really care when you are single and don't have kids. And usually people get married relatively late nowadays, especially the ones with higher education. And primary school does not cost that much anyway, it's more when it comes to secondary, junior high that it starts getting costly. So, MEH.
> * he has top-level health insurance, and he knows there's a 0% chance he'll ever lose it; he hasn't got a clue what "preexisting condition" might even mean;
Top Level insurance ! That's what french people say without stepping out of their country. There are numerous countries where you get private insurance AND better service than in France. Top-Level insurance in france gets you in a free public hospital where you may very well catch infections that will end up killing you. There's like hundred of thousands people per year in France dying of infections they contracted in top level hospitals. So please put in pinch of salt in your statement.
> * he lives in a place safe enough that there's no sense in paying to live in a gated community
Oh my GOD. France is nowhere near safe as so many other countries around it. You must live in Neuilly or something, but I tell you, when you live in suburbs you are nowhere near safe for you and your possessions.
> * he's got decent unemployment insurance
Based on growing country's public debt, so I'd say it's not really sustainable in the long term, but hey, Keynesians say it's OK never to repay the debt, so I must be wrong.
> * his retirement is funded;
Funded by debt. French govenrment borrows billions of euros every month on the private markets to keep functioning and paying for such benefits. And actually, it's not funded, because you are currently paying for the current retirees, not for your own retirement. If the demography should fail and the government go bankrupt, your retirement money is up in the air.
So, I'd say your vision of things is incredibly biased, and I'm not sure how much experience you have abroad. I've live in 4 different countries outside of France and I've nowhere felt that France had such a better system than all the others. And most french people who left the country actually never come back.
I'm going on 40. I'm not married, and I won't be having kids. From your list of benefits:
* although I also didn't have a student loan, it wasn't thanks to French taxes.
* I don't / won't have kids so their subsidised schooling does nothing for me individually
* health insurance. I'm still young enough that I don't have any major health problems, although of course, insurance is also protecting me from accidents and what not, so I am getting some benefit from this. Concretely though, I haven't as yet got much more than a few courses of antibiotics paid by the government in 10 years.
* safe enough? Pretty much the only reason you don't have gated communities in France is because all of the places that rich people live in have been there for hundreds of years. If they could figure out a way of doing it, the 16th arrondisment of Paris would totally gate itself off.
* unemployment - yeah, I'll give you this one. I'm almost tempted to try and get myself fired, just so that I can spend three years funded by the taxpayer to start my own business. (not really, but that idea certainly removes any fear I have of getting fired).
* retirement - no reasonable person believes that people of my age or younger will get much of a retirement pension. If you're not taking steps to guarantee your own retirement at this point, your going to get a bad surprise at the end of your career.
* I'm not having kids, so parental leave gets me nothing
* massive tax breaks for nannies etc? well, in the sense that you can more or less claim their salary off your salary for tax purposes, I suppose that's true, provided you're actually making enough money to be able to take someone on in the first place (I personally have a housecleaner, but my flat is so small that she only works for 3 hours a week - at her hourly rate, that works out to a tax saving for me of around 1000E a year. Not exactly massive).
As always with government subsidies, they are just not as flexible as giving people the money and letting them decide for themselves how they are going to spend it. My salary is suppressed to pay for a whole lot of benefits that I personally will never see. There is a case to be made to limiting government subsidies to oly those activities that the government can do cheaper than anyone else (maintaining roads, fire department, police department).
So why am I still in France if the deal is so raw? Well, personal reasons, and I'm also enough of a lefty that I do see value in providing good education, public transport and health services to everybody, so I don't resent those taxes. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would decide otherwise if they had the choice.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
No need to translate I think - except perhaps for the last word, which must be understood as "solidarity", not just "brotherhood".
My situation is quite similar to yours. I dislike to depend on others, I'm selfish in my own way, but I dislike it when people are struggling because they don't have enough money to live. Just because they were born less lucky than I, or because something terrible happened to them, or because they made mistakes. I would find it hard to enjoy what I earned in the middle of a shanty town.
So I don't moan and complain too much when I have to pay my taxes. I'm not short of money anyway.
> But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would decide otherwise if they had the choice
You would lose that bet. For the last 30 years at least people have elected either socialists or moderate right wing representatives. Even N. Sarkozy would be considered a lefty in the US.
And most importantly although it was off topic wrt the OP: homo economics is a lie. It does not describe how individuals are motivated, and works barely better when applied to large groups of people. As you acknowledge it fails to describe your own incentive (yes I know, if something as fundamental was flawed in economics models, we'd notice, because economic predictions would be ridiculously inaccurate, bit guess what?)